Religion And Sexuality In Peter Shaffer's Equus

In Peter Shaffer’s Equus, the plot revolves around seventeen year-old Alan Strang’s obsession with horses, culminating in his blinding six horses in one night. Despite committing this terrible crime, Alan is not inherently a bad person; instead, he is the victim of social taboos surrounding religion and sexuality as enforced by his parents and social heterosexual expectations as represented by Jill. Furthermore, no one will hold these people and concepts accountable for their actions. This allows them, a representation of society at large, to continue oppressing those who have deviations from what they consider normal beliefs, personalities, or behaviors. Firstly, Alan does not feel attraction to human females, instead only truly experiencing sexual feelings around horses. Despite this, he tries to live up to social heterosexual expectations through Jill, a friend who introduced first introduced him to the stable. …show more content…
Furthermore, he discovered his father at the theater, presumably enjoying and aroused by the movie. Upon realizing that his dad was just another man with sexual feelings and attraction to women, Alan felt further isolated from society; until then, he had never viewed his dad as a sexual creature. This isolation from one of the only people he had ever viewed as nonsexual led Alan to attempt to be sexual himself by having intercourse with Jill, with her encouragement and consent. When he failed to penetrate her, he became angry and dissociative, leading to his attack on the creatures that he believed to be causing his sexual difficulties. While this was happening, Jill was trying to calm him down, but as he was in a depersonalized state he most likely did not even hear her. Following the attack, Jill openly blamed herself and had multiple nervous